Wednesday, November 14, 2007

towards an intelligent user interface

Most interfaces today present the very same "face" to a vast variety of users, from children to adults, from novices to experts. Most pieces of knowledge on the Internet have exactly the same form regardless of who is trying to understand it. The future demands that adaptable learning be the center of all knowledge presentations, including that of the user interface itself. The user interfaces have to be able to create a fairly accurate model of each user and use that model to modify the presentation of its knowledge structures, including finding other humans on the net that might be able to help. This area constitutes new frontiers in adaptable systems, models of humans and human knowledge, etc.- Make it Happen in the Best Possible Way

Good flexible, interactive teachers continually adapt what they are delivering to their students as they pick up on the feedback which helps inform the teacher of which pathway to take through the materials to reach some desired goal.

Good constructionist learning environments (eg. Harel's ISDP) can also be created in which the learning materials themselves become "objects to think with" and sometimes help the learner without the teacher intervening directly. Although the teacher might help directly and the teacher has used a lot of knowledge to help create the learning environment

A possible next step along this trajectory is one envisaged in the alan kay quote. Live knowledge adapts the way it presents itself to the learner in ways that invite learning depending on the current knowledge state of the learner.

Intelligent knowledge interacts with intelligent human. Sometimes the knowledge is smarter, at other times the human is smarter.